I was at Jeff Croft’s ses­sion on Ele­gant Web Typog­ra­phy at Web Direc­tions South when he talked about font siz­ing. He unwit­tingly caused a bit of a silent out­cry, send­ing the Twit­ter back chan­nel crazy, when he men­tioned that he uses pix­els to size text rather than an IE6-supported rel­a­tive unit such as ems or percentages.

His rea­son­ing was that peo­ple who need to enlarge font size in their browsers will have already moved off Inter­net Explorer 6 and onto a browser that allows them to do that already (Inter­net Explorer 6 does not allow resiz­ing of text defined in pix­els or points, whereas it does allow resiz­ing of text defined in ems, per­cent­ages or keywords).

I’m with the oth­ers who com­mented via Twit­ter dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion – I don’t nec­es­sar­ily think that’s the case. At any rate, at Clever Starfish we almost always use ems for text siz­ing rather than pix­els (I’m sure there are excep­tions in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, but for the most part, we try).

SitePoint’s Kevin Yank inter­viewed Derek Feath­er­stone dur­ing the con­fer­ence and have a record­ing of that ses­sion avail­able on their site, as well as a tran­script: Derek Feath­er­stone: Acces­si­bil­ity is More Than Com­pli­ance. in it, Kevin asks Derek what he thinks about Jeff’s state­ments and his opin­ion is what I would expect from an acces­si­bil­ity expert: until we can be sure that IE6 is not being used any more, we can’t afford not to make allowances. It was such a hot topic that Kevin pulled out Derek’s response on just that point for a sep­a­rate post: Pixel Fonts a Hot But­ton Topic at WSD08. Does any­one else find it funny that the photo of Derek used on that post is one cred­ited to Jeff?

I remem­ber danc­ing in glee the day that The Counter told me that world­wide, Netscape 4 usage had dropped to under 2% for the third month run­ning – that was when my pre­vi­ous employer offi­cially decreed that we no longer sup­ported it for gen­eral web sites. I’m sure it’s going to be a long time before we can hold Inter­net Explorer 6 in the same kind of con­tempt, but hold out web peeps – that day will come. For the record, The Counter reports that in Sep­tem­ber 2008, IE6 was at 36%, still well ahead of Fire­fox on 17% but just below Inter­net Explorer 7 at 41%.

For the record, I think that the rest of Jeff’s ses­sion was very good – he cov­ered the basics of web typog­ra­phy, and touched on grid sys­tems and the impor­tance of using proper typo­graph­i­cal sym­bols for quotes, dashes and the like (which I also attempt to do also).